The Beauty Queen of Leenane

What our readers say

The Beauty Queen of Leenanne is a heartfelt two-act play set in a quaint rural cottage, capturing the deep complexities of mother-daughter bonds, the rich tapestry of life in tight-knit communities, and Ireland’s enduring connections to England and the US. With gentle nuance, it touches upon mental health and subtly navigates the challenges of domestic and elder abuse, weaving its story chronologically.

What is it like reading this play now? How has it aged?

This first play by the hugely successful British-Irish playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh was hit that transferred to the West End and Broadway, winning a slew of Tony Awards. It is easy to see why, with dialogue veering seamlessly from the comic to the violent and cruel, and the relationship between mother and daughter engrossing from the get-go. Woven into the play are themes of loneliness and the need for love and meaning in one’s life, and explorations of the experiences of racism, isolation and exploitation faced by Irish migrant workers in the UK. There is a moment of shocking violence that would be just as horrendous to witness today as it would have been in the 1990s.

What does it tell us about the past and present?

Set decades ago in a rural context, where communication relies on the leaving of paper messages and the sending of letters, what seems to age the play is the sense of rural Ireland in the 1990s as a still isolated place, and of England as somewhere that felt far away. Entertainment in the play consists of Australian soaps on terrestrial television and social events in the village. Today this home in Galway would be in the Ireland that lived through the major economic development and EU integration of the 1990s, a massive shift to social liberalism, a better understanding globally of mental ill-health and, as everywhere else, the advent of the internet and its change to what we understand by the word ‘isolation’. Whether or not Mag and Maureen’s relationship would be any better in the Ireland of the 2020s, however, is open to question. They seem irredeemably dysfunctional.

What plays does it speak to/influence?

This was the first in McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy: the other two plays being A Skull in Connemara and The Lonesome West. The claustrophobic and tense relationship between two female members of the same family in Ireland, in a single space and in fraught co-dependence, reminds me of the very recent play The Dry House by Eugene O’Hare.

What films or music does it make you think of?

Film: inevitably, McDonagh’s hit film from 2022, The Banshees of Inisherin. Music: the play features the song The Spinning Wheel by Irish folk singer and collector of Irish ballads Delia Murphy, from an album released in 1962. One character in the play describes her as being ‘like a ghoul singing’. Having listened, I’m not sure I quite agree but it is definitely music from a time gone by.